Israel pioneers electric car network

Israel has signed a deal with an electric transport company to install
thousands of recharging points for electric cars across the country.

2:33AM GMT 09 Dec 2008

The network, run by US-based firm Better Place, will be ready for commercial use by 2021. It will be the first nationwide network of its kind in the world.

In a pilot project, Better Place will install 500 of the charging points by the end of this year in cities, including Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, the Guardian reports. It expects to have 500,000 charging points by the time the first cars are marketed.

Moshe Kaplinsky, head of Better Place Israel, told the paper: "This vision is to stop this addiction to oil."

"Unfortunately a great part of the resources of oil are held by countries that don't share the same values we cherish in the western civilisation where we live. The gap is very clear between the price of producing a barrel of oil and the price that it sells for on the world market. And in some places these profits finance terror."

Better Place has signed deals for similar electric car networks in San Francisco, Hawaii, Denmark and Australia, but the project in Israel is the first spanning a whole country.

Renault-Nissan will supply the electric cars.

Given Israel's small size, the company expects relatively little need for changing batteries. A return trip from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, for example, covers 75 miles.